Ceph is a distributed storage system that provides object, file, and block storage. On each storage node you’ll find a file system where Ceph stores objects and a Ceph OSD (Object storage daemon) process. On a Ceph cluster you’ll also find Ceph MON (monitoring) daemons, which ensure that the Ceph cluster remains highly available.

Rook acts as a Kubernetes orchestration layer for Ceph, deploying the OSD and MON processes as POD replica sets. From the Rook README file:

Rook deploys the PODs in two namespaces, rook-ceph-system and rook-ceph. On my cluster it took about 2 minutes for the PODs to deploy, initialize, and get to a running state. While I was waiting for everything to finish I checked the POD status with:

Final tasks

Now I need to do two more things before I can install Prometheus and Grafana:

I need to make Rook the default storage provider for my cluster.

Since the Prometheus Helm chart requests volumes formatted with the XFS filesystem, I need to install XFS tools on all of my Ubuntu Kubernetes nodes. (XFS is not yet installed by Kubespray by default, although there’s currently a PR up that addresses that issue.)

Make Rook the default storage provider

To make Rook the default storage provider I just run a kubectl command:

That updates the rook-ceph-block storage class and makes it the default for storage on the cluster. Any applications that I install will use Rook+Ceph for their data storage if they don’t specify a specific storage class.

Install XFS tools

Normally I would not recommend running one-off commands on a cluster. If you want to make a change to a cluster, you should encode the change in a playbook so it’s applied every time you update the cluster or add a new node. That’s why I submitted a PR to Kubespray to address this problem.

However, since my Kubespray PR has not yet merged, and I built the cluster using Kubespray, and Kubespray uses Ansible, one of the easiest ways to install XFS tools on all hosts is by using the Ansible “run a single command on all hosts” feature: